Our commitment to the digital humanities

It cant have been very long after people started writing that they started to organize and comment on what was written. Look at the 10th century Moncler Rod Jacket Venetus A manuscript, which contains scholia written fifteen centuries earlier about texts written five centuries before that. Almost since computers were invented, people have envisioned using them to expose the interconnections of the worlds knowledge. That vision is finally becoming real with the flowering of the web, but in a notably limited way: very little of the worlds culture predating the web is accessible online. Much of that information is available only in printed books.A wide range of digitization efforts have been pursued with increasing success over the past decade. Were proud of our own Google Books digitization effort, having scanned over 12 million books in more than 400 languages, comprising over five billion pages and two trillion words. But digitization is just the starting point: it will take a vast amount of work by scholars and computer scientists to analyze these digitized texts. In particular, humanities scholars are starting to apply quantitative research techniques for answering questions that require examining thousands or millions of books. This style of research complements the methods of many contemporary humanities scholars, who have individually achieved great insights through in-depth reading and painstaking analysis of dozens or hundreds of texts. We believe both approaches have merit, and that each is good for answering different types of questions.Here are a few examples of inquiries that benefit from a computational approach. Moncler Kraka Jacket Shouldnt we be able to characterize Victorian society by quantifying shifts in vocabularynot just of a few leading writers, but of every book written during the era? Shouldnt it be easy to locate electronic copies of the English and Latin editions of Hobbes Leviathan, compare them and annotate the differences? Shouldnt a Spanish reader be able to locate every Spanish translation of The Iliad? Shouldnt there be an electronic dictionary and grammar for the Yao language?We think so. Funding agencies have been supporting this field of research, known as the digital humanities, for years. In particular, the National Endowment for the Humanities has taken a leadership role, having established an Office of Digital Humanities in 2007. NEH chairman Jim Leach says: "In the modern world, access to knowledge is becoming as central to advancing equal opportunity as access to the ballot box has proven to be the key to advancing political rights. Few revolutions in human history can match the democratizing consequences of the development of the web and the accompanying advancement of digital technologies to tap this accumulation of human knowledge."Likewise, wed like to see the field blossom and take advantage of resources such as Google Books that are becoming increasingly available. Moncler Branson Jacket Were pleased to announce that Google has committed nearly a million dollars to support digital humanities research over the next two years.Googles Digital Humanities Research Awards will support 12 university research groups with unrestricted grants for one year, with the possibility of renewal for an additional year. The recipients will receive some access to Google tools, technologies and expertise.